Outdoor ads: smart media network enters great outdoors

Brands such as Heineken, Lynx, Green Giant and British Airways are encouraging consumers to interact with their brands by letting them simulate throwing javelins at, flirting with and high-fiving digital posters. The use of smart outdoor media can increase dwell time and, in some cases, generate YouTube footage or other online content that have a life far beyond their original location.

Digital out-of-home (OOH) is going from strength to strength, with revenues reaching £101m last year and accounting for £1 of every £8 spent on outdoor as a whole. But as screen technology develops, moving images alone are no longer enough to create cut-through.

Consumer involvement

Green Giant marketing manager Tracy Roberts says: “Consumer involvement is so important. When people start interacting, they get a clearer view of the campaign idea because it becomes something that they’ve done with that brand.”

Consumers’ attitudes are also changing. A recent study by Kinetic Worldwide shows that 60% of consumers want to interact more with digital OOH screens, and 47% are interested in downloading discount vouchers from digital screens to their mobile phone.

Kinetic Worldwide global director of insight and marketing Nick Mawditt, who led the study, says: “There’s no division of media any more. Out of home, in home, it melts into one experience. But what we’ve noticed recently is that consumers are now ready to interact with these emerging technologies, engage and download content, whereas two years ago consumers felt that brands were trying to push them too much.”

This change in attitude has driven brands to think about smart outdoor media in a more joined up way, seamlessly running activity online, on tablets, mobile and outdoor and integrating social media too.

The development of near-field communication (NFC) technology also means that consumers can effortlessly download anything from discount vouchers to film trailers from enabled sites, transforming OOH into a transaction-based media.

Clear Channel also contributed to the study and chief executive Matthew Dearden says: “The important thing for OOH right now is that creatives realise what they can do with new technology and clients realise that digital is much more of a scale prospect than it was a few years ago.

“Creatively we are still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of how we can use out-of-home media to achieve broadcast levels of awareness, while driving more personal and intimate levels of engagement.”

One-to-one engagement, alongside wider digital follow-up, was key to General Mills’ High Five campaign for Green Giant that ran in Manchester’s Trafford Centre at the end of October. Created with agencies Grand Visual and Work Club, the campaign invited children to stand in front of a screen and attempt to “high five” the 4-metre tall green giant stood next to them in the augmented reality screen.

Each time a child managed to high five the giant, he praised them with responses such as “Corn-tastic” and reinforced the message that eating five portions of fruit and veg a day will help them become big and strong, says Roberts.

The High Five event was part of a wider campaign, including traditional six-sheets, a new Facebook profile and a targeted campaign that focused on bloggers.

Roberts says: “We’re going to be sharing out the photos of the event further into the social media sphere, creating a video of the highlights and streaming that video online.

“Although it’s a very specific location over a couple of days, it’s really looking at how we use it further and so we’re measuring return on investment from lots of different elements from social media activity to sales performance.”

Physical interaction and motion sensing technology was also essential to the outdoor campaign run by British Airways in its role as the airline partner of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The They Will Fly campaign allowed passers-by to compete in their own Olympic events, such as sprinting, javelin, discus and cycling. The best times and distances were recorded on the screen’s leader board and on BA’s social media sites.

Insurance provider Swiftcover, in conjunction with Screen-reach, also turned a 72-sheet billboard into a live, interactive high-speed driving game.

By downloading an app, passers-by could use their mobile handsets as controllers for the multiplayer game. Each race winner was presented with a voucher to receive a prize, which gave Swiftcover an opportunity to measure interactions with the brand.

Swiftcover senior marketing manager Amanda Edwards says: “We like the idea that this technology can engage with people on a billboard, which then encourages them to engage on a smartphone and share this in the social media space. It is a great way to reach a wider audience.

“This allows the brand to communicate with users on a few different levels and also engage with their network of friends.”

Connecting OOH interaction to an individual’s social media activity was taken further by Heineken. In September, its lager brand Foster’s put digital posters in bus shelters that allowed consumers to create and submit content for Facebook directly from the poster (see Brand in the Spotlight, below).

Similarly, the brewer created a launch campaign for the red berry variant of Bulmers No17 cider using 11 six-sheet touchscreen bus shelters that allowed people to create messages much like magnetic fridge lettering.

The bus shelter ’poetry’ created was in line with the campaign’s Experimenters Wanted message that was based on the unusual combination of flavours featured in the cider. The campaign received 25,000 interactions, with almost 5,000 phrases saved to Facebook.

Like Bulmers, Ford UK advertising and sponsorship manager Lyn West says brands need to fit interactive outdoor executions with the overall campaign messaging to maximise recognition. To launch the new C-Max model, Ford worked with Grand Visual, Ogilvy & Mather and JCDecaux to create an augmented reality screen that allowed customers to experience some of the new technology, such as park assist, which helps drivers guide vehicles into small spaces.

West says: “The messaging we wanted to convey about the project was very technological, so we took the idea of ’innovation in your hand’ beyond traditional advertising.” Ford was therefore able to give people a virtual experience of the new technology.

Lynx’s Falling Angels campaign similarly tied in with the brand’s cheeky tone of voice and messaging. The campaign saw augmented reality angels flirt with the large numbers of passers-by at Victoria Station in London and the Bullring Shopping Centre in Birmingham.

But for Lynx marketing manager Selina Sykes, the key to the success of digital OOH is that it has a life beyond its experiential reach to secure return on investment.

She says: “Integration throughout the marketing plan is vital regardless of how exciting the technology may appear. The real value of this activity was leveraged when the video assets went viral, extending the life and reach of the original campaign as it spread to online audiences of more than 950,000.

“Augmented reality on this scale has huge impact and really stops people in their tracks. This experiential campaign was a great way to amplify our online and social media activity in a broadcast environment in a way that traditional outdoor simply couldn’t.”